Should I upgrade?

C

chineseman

[H]ard|Gawd
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Mar 28, 2004
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I've been out of the loop since I only visit the hardware forums when it's upgrade time otherwise I end up scratching the itch :D. I upgraded to a 30" monitor a few months back and never noticed a performance hit since I wasn't playing any FPS games at the time. Lately, however, I've been playing some FPS games in my backlog and noticed the 2560x1600 resolution is bringing my system to its knees.

I don't really need specifics since I can just read one of the many other threads once I figure out my budget. I'm just wondering what kind of performance increase I should expect by upgrading to a newer processor and what kind of video card I should be looking at. I'm guessing I'm gonna need to go with a 2 card solution to tame this resolution. I'm very sensitive to FPS drops and would like to play at 60fps with high settings, I'm getting around 30-40 right now which is no bueno. My current system is listed below in my signature.

Thanks in advance.
 
Seems like you are leaving out some information. Modern Warfare 2 is much less resource intensive than, say, Crysis 2. Or BFBC2. In other words, what specific games do you want to play?
 
I've been mostly playing Team Fortress 2 and APB:Reloaded to pass the time until all the goodies come out later this year (mostly BF3 like everybody else). They both run fine for the most part but when it gets crazy there's a very noticeable drop in FPS for me.

I just have a lot of extra time in the next two weeks where I can fiddle around with a new system build and get everything up and running cause I usually don't have the patience to deal with this stuff :D. I'm not too worried about the video card situation right now cause it looks like the next gen stuff will be coming out soon and it's easy enough to swap out a video card and install new drivers. It's putting together everything else and installing all my programs and configuring everything that irritates me.
 
With just a CPU upgrade to the Core i5 2500K alone, you're looking at an increase in gaming performance of about 15% to 20% on average depending on the game. And that's before you start overclocking the Core i5 2500K.

However the biggest difference maker will be a new GPU setup. And you are correct that you're gonna need a dual-GPU solution if you want high settings at 2560x1200 for gaming. You should be looking at GTX 560 Ti SLI, HD 6950 2GB Crossfire, GTX 570 SLI, or HD 6970 2GB Crossfire.

Do note that all of the above GPU upgrades will require a new PSU altogether. However if you want to stick with your current PSU, you might be ok with a single HD 6970 2GB as long as you don't turn on AA and lower other settings too.

So to answer your question, I'm gonna ask you a series of questions: Is your current PC no longer meeting your gaming needs? If not, can you afford to upgrade your PC to the above parts? If so, then yes, upgrade.
 
Thanks for the advice. To answer your question, most games run adequately (30-40 fps) but I'd like to have a steady 60fps with decent settings if its even possible on 2560x1600 res. I fired up BFBC2 and it was not a pretty sight.

I've been meaning to get a second ssd to install my games on, a large hdd for storage, and my current mobo doesn't support sli/xfire so I figured I might as well just upgrade everything and see how it does with my current video card. If things are still dragging then I'll probably wait for the new gen of vid cards.
 
is your 9550 oc'd? if not prehaps you should start there as it should OC nicely and remove some of the bottleneck. If you do see a nice jump in performance prehaps look at finding another 5870 somewhere and running them together in crossfire.....ofcourse this is just the most economically efficient approach. The ultimate upgrade would be the i5 2500k with a pair of gtx 570/ HD 69502gb. All that said....60fps average at maxed out settings (including aa) at that resolution is a really tall order to fill.
 
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